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I saw a video about a fatal oil drilling accident where the resulting investigation found that an operator had ignored the alarm which indicated the underlying issue because there were other alarms sounding for things he'd been told to ignore because they were benign. This is apparently common enough cause of problems that there is a term for it (other than "crying wolf"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alarm_fatigue

I've seen it during my career as a software developer, too. Heaps of alert spam that remained unread because 99% of them were useless and not indicative of a problem on our end. It's important to be careful about alerts so you know when real problems occur.

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Reminds me of my time in a large dormitory. The first time the fire alarm went off at night without there even being a fire, I went outside. All the other times - and I lost track of counting - I just ignored it and went back to sleep.
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This also how a part of how a certain flagship got promoted to a submarine recently.
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On a finance level this is why correctly setting 'accidental trade limits' correctly is important. Otherwise traders see them so often they click through them.
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And because of this, no browser of mine is allowed to send notifications, and also no app by default - they have to prove themselves useful first. Sorry fellow developers working on notifications, your work goes to the drain (mostly).
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I recently unsubscribed from a grocery delivery service becuase they kept pushing adverts through their app. I gave them notification permission so I could see when my delivery is nearby, not so they could spam me. Voting with my wallet on this one.

(For the curious, a subscription means free delivery. The subscription costs 10 euro a month, and if you don't have a subscription, the delivery fee is around 4 euro)

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In France, we have a bed story for children related to exactly that: "Pierre et le loup" (aka your "crying wolf").

It may be a EU wide tale.

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It's one of Aesop's fables, so it's probably widely known in all of Europe.
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It’s a common tale in English speaking world as well, but we don’t use it as a bedtime story because of the ending.

Edit. Didn’t realize it might just be an English version where the boy is killed and eaten. Aesop’s original didn’t have that. Just the sheep killed.

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In the US spewing all the alarms at the line level employees and fatiguing the shit out of them is a direct (and predictable, but of course everyone who complained in advance got sneered at by the usual demographics) result of OSHA policy. Same bunch of moronic incentives that result in there being a policy against everything and employees technically violating the rules to work normally. Whenever you see an alarm fatigue workplace there's usually a rule in the rulebook that says they have to stop what they're doing for every alarm until it's triaged and documented. This is how the rules financially incentivize the company to act even if it's stupid and results in more screw ups.
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> a policy against everything and employees technically violating the rules to work normally.

This is called "normalization of deviance" and generally should be avoided, because it often precedes a serious accident.

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>This is called "normalization of deviance"

You don't even need to get to the point of breaking the rules for it to be a problem. This is stupid human factors type stuff.

The filthy capitalists don't want their oil rigs going kaboom and their expensively trained workers having injury downtime. There is a natural incentive alignment to some extent here.

And then the useful idiots show up, and rather than fostering that alignment they put their thumb on the scale and they change the calculations. The filthy capitalists crunch the numbers and they realize that over the life of the oil rig and a fleet of some number of them they'll make more money spewing alarms at the guys running the place until their eyes glaze over. Sure he'll miss something important blowing up the works with loss of life and limb 2/<big number> amount of the time instead of 1/<big number> if you'd have tuned it right buuuuut, you'll lose less money that way because if you do it the "right" way you'll get dinged by the OSHA people every time some petty accident type happens because you turned the alarm for that one off so as not to fatigue people. You see this goddamn fact pattern all the time. Machinery beepers, hazard signage and barriers, etc, etc, it never fucking ends.

Great job guys, Mission Accomplished (TM). When everything is a hazard nothing is.

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Yeah, if only the government didn't regulate that pesky

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workplace safety, then for-profit companies could be free to act for the good of all, like they always do!

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It’s the same in Romania where they use the system for every little thing from it’s raining heavily (often the alert comes during said heavy rain) or a nearby fire, or one infamous message saying something on the lines of “here comes the bear” when a bear was spotted within city limits. And it’s loud so a lot of people simply disabled the alerts altogether. But now that the real alerts are coming - see Russian drones entering the country, many people have them disabled
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I got the bear one while on Transfăgărășan. Which is funny because the bears are totally expected there.
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Taiwan has emergency messages, though not _that_ high frequency. There the main topics involve:

- earthquakes: these can arrive indeed before you even feel them (a few seconds before); they filter it to areas where it's expected to be felt, there are discussions around how sensitive to make it (how wide area it should cover)

- extremely heavy rain: this was new recently, and very useful, when locally it all went cats & dogs, more than maybe I've ever seen. See an example here: https://fosstodon.org/@imrehg/117058657161401667

- military drills: the yearly "if there's an invasion drill", they had sent reminder a week before, and then at the start/end; example here: https://fosstodon.org/@imrehg/117030180601973598

- Chinese rocket launches that will fly over the island (not sure what could one do about it, and never seen anything, so maybe this is more borderline)

Interestingly (for me), the headers seems to change over time. Started with "Presidential Alert", there were "Government Alert" then, now "Emergency Alert" and just "Alert". I'm not sure if there area list of these or it evolved over time...

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Madness to me that a nation with a genuine need for emergency protocol spams their alert system.
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> You can set your phone to filter these out, but then you'll also miss the notification about North Korea commencing artillery bombardment.

Considering most of SK's population is in Seoul, and Seoul is within range of NK artillery, wouldn't most people be aware before the notification came anyways?

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South Korean Intelligence and it's allies presumably have agents in the NK military who would give them advance notice.
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NK can just set up their own cell phone receiving SK alerts and know that they know and cancel the strike, making it into a boy that called wolf situation and possibly exposing agents.
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> You can set your phone to filter these out, but then you'll also miss the notification about North Korea commencing artillery bombardment.

Do you know why there aren't more granular controls? On my phone in the US the toggleable alert options are:

Extreme Threats

Severe Threats

AMBER alerts (child abduction alerts)

Public Safety Messages

State and Local Tests

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I would have thought so too, but it turns out that the USA seems to have the exact same problem!

Millions of Texans were woken up at 4AM to an "EXTREME" level alert because one police officer was shot when he went to serve an arrest warrant to a suspected burglar at his apartment at 11pm earlier the same night. The officer recovered and was back on duty 5 weeks later. This shooting happened in one of the most remote parts of Texas, so people who were over 700 miles / 1.1 megameter / 12 hour drive away all got the notification at 4AM.

The only option Texans had would have been to disable all alerts entirely, because this was an "EXTREME" level alert.

https://www.404media.co/texas-blue-alert-emergency-notificat...

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I live in DFW Texas, use to be when you heard the tornado sirens you hit the deck. Now they go off, not kidding, for pingpong ball hail and “high winds”. That’s basically 1 out of every 4-5 spring/summer thunderstorms.
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What are they expecting a Texan civilian who gets this alert to even do? This is baffling.
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I mean, it is Texas; it's not unreasonable to expect thousands of heavily-armed people to form a posse and shot a few dozen people unrelated to the situation.
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There are more granular controls, but the details are OS/phone specific and the selected threat level is ultimately at the discretion of the government bureaucrat pressing the SPAM button.
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In the UK a few years ago, they tested the government emergency alert system, which was basically your phone turning into an air raid siren, regardless of what SMS filters you had set.

I would imagine South Korea has a similar system?

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Just a few days ago, I received one because of "the odour nuisance is no danger for the population"

People were calling the emergency hotline because the wildfires 200km away got so big that their smoke engulfed the city.

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Every government should only put people who have worked in a SOC in charge of these systems. There's no way to take the cost of useless alerts seriously unless you've spent some time tuning them and living with the tradeoffs.
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One can only hope the government has some klaxons stashed away.

Side note: isn’t it crazy how Seoul is so close to the border that you can see North Korea on a clear sunny day? And the aforementioned traditional artillery-ableness of it all because of that?

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